Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron

By Jasper Fforde

Eddie Russet is an average young man with high ideals. As he comes to find out, high ideals won't get you anywhere in his world. What his society values above all is conformity. What it doesn't want is someone like Eddie with his impertinent questions, his new ideas on how to make things better and his refusal to look the other way.
In Eddie's world, social status is defined by color. Not by the color of one's skin. But by the color you can see. Everyone in Eddie's world is colorblind. People of Eddie's bloodline can see shades of red, to varying degrees. Other groups perceive violet, blue, green, yellow, or orange. No one sees the full spectrum and at the bottom socially are the Greys, who see no color at all. To them the world is just shades of grey.
Which makes for a pretty drab world. Except for the work of National Color. National Color pipes artificial dies of the brightest hues to towns and villages across the land and these dies are used to color the grass, the flowers, whatever and these artificial colors can be seen by all the citizens, even the Greys.
Not only are the people of this world unable to see the full spectrum of visible color, they are very susceptible to the artificial colors created by National Color, which act on them like a narcotic and like medication. Eddie's father is a Swatchman, a kind of physician. He carries a pallet of swatches of color that he uses to treat his patients simply by placing the swatch in the person's line of sight. And if the patient is suffering from a fatal disease, he can view "Lincoln" which is an intense shade of green that induces pleasant hallucinations and eases pain as the person is dying. Naturally, there is a black market in swatches for people using the colors just to get high.
Eddie gets in trouble with the authorities for playing a prank and is sent to a village on the outskirts of society to do a chair census, to count the number of chairs in the village. Going along with Eddie is his dad the Swatchman. The village's resident swatchman has died under suspicious circumstances and Eddie's dad is to fill in until a new swatchman can be found.
Since class is based on color perception, the rule for society is to marry to improve your children's color vision. Reds are only one step up from Grey, and Eddie's family, the Russets, are pretty low in Red. So Eddie has set his sights on a young woman of the Oxblood family, who not only are higher in the social scale but who also own a string factory and are very well off. The Oxblood girl has other suitors and Eddie is sorry to have to leave town and loose his advantage to the other guys.
But while Eddie and his dad are doing some sightseeing, they stumble across a crime scene that may involve black market swatches. And Eddie meets a angry young Grey girl named Jane. Jane knows a lot more about the true state of things than poor, naive Eddie does and as Eddie gets to know Jane better, he finds out that his society is not quite an innocent and benign as he has been brought up to believe.

Eddie lives in a strange world, a world where lightning strikes are frequent and people have to be on the look out for killer swans. Spoons are good as gold. People get high by looking at swatches of color. Most people die of the Mildew, which is a kind of fungus infection that kills within a few hours of exposure. Everything and everyone is tightly controlled, even to the kind of clothes worn in various situations. Being different gets a person a trip to Reboot and no one ever comes back from Reboot. Their society lives on the remains of the highly advanced society that came before, a society so technologically advanced that the roads they created repair themselves.
I found this wonderfully complex new world of Jasper Fforde's simply fascinating. And much more accessible than his Thursday Next series or the Nursery Crime series. Eddie is an innocent who stumbles on the grim truth about Reboot and National Color and even about his own father's profession of Swatchman. It's a strange world, but it works. And I really enjoyed reading about it. Apparently there are two more in the works, Painting by Numbers and The Gordini Protocols. Looking forward very much to reading them when they are published.